The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 transformed ordinary life for most Americans. Workers went home, students were taught remotely, most social activities were cancelled, and the wearing of masks was recommended. As they did a century earlier when the 1918 influenza pandemic killed more than half a million people, authorities nationwide scrambled to adopt preventative measures to keep their communities safe.
Within VA, the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) made the difficult decision to suspend funeral services to protect visitors and staff. More than a year later, Calverton National Cemetery in New York—an early pandemic epicenter—held a special service to make up for what had been missed. On July 8, 2021, the cemetery presented the casket flag (pictured above) during a single solemn ceremony in which 849 Veterans belatedly received military honors.
During an eleven-week span from March 23 to June 8, 2020, committal services were placed on hold throughout the national cemetery system, preventing family, friends, honor guards, and cemetery and mortuary personnel from attending funeral programs. To meet the needs of Greater New York City, Calverton staff performed approximately fifty “direct interments” daily, without family or ceremony. The cemetery, which opened in 1978 at the eastern end of Long Island, is one of VA’s largest at more than 1,000 acres. Before the pandemic, about one hundred funeral services per week were held there.
For a full year after committal services resumed in June 2020, the families of Veterans interred during the pandemic were offered an opportunity for a traditional memorial service with military honors. These were held on Saturdays when NCA generally does not conduct burials. Families scheduled these “makeup services” for 285 Veterans. However, as of July 2021, another 849 Veterans who had been buried in Calverton since March 2020 had not received military honors. To rectify this, the cemetery quietly held an hour-long memorial service on July 8.
The program included a rifle salute, playing of “Taps,” bagpipers, and an Honor Guard folding the flag. Employees representing all the cemetery crews read the Veterans’ names aloud. Cemetery Executive Director Anne Ellis, who participated in the name-reading, explained, “It was a deeply meaningful and healing experience for the Calverton team to be able to provide honors to these Veterans interred during this extraordinary period in the history of our agency and our nation.” The flag subsequently became part of the NCA History Collection.
From the beginning of the pandemic through January 2022, Calverton performed 10,704 interments. Of these, 975 were attributed to COVID-19. The actual number is likely much higher, however, as testing was not widely available early in the pandemic, when the cemetery’s interment rate doubled.
By Sara Amy Leach
Senior Historian, National Cemetery Administration
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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 87: Shoulder Patch for Veterans Administration Military Personnel in World War II
For a time during and after World War II, active duty military personnel were assigned to the Veterans Administration.
That assignment was represented by a blue circle with a golden phoenix rising from the ashes. This was the shoulder patch worn by the more than 1,000 physicians, dentists, and other medical professionals serving in the U.S. Army at VA medical centers.
This was the same patch worn by Gen. Omar Bradley during his time as VA administrator after the war concluded.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
